Palo Alto Concours

I attended the Palo Alto Concours competition - one of the finest gatherings of concours quality cars that's conducted locally. Pebble Beach is the one most people tend to talk about, however the selection of cars and the quality of those displayed as just as good at Palo Alto.

The day was hot and muggy - 90-95 degrees all day. The sun was bearing down, but I met some interesting people. The biggest pleasant surprise of the day was that Fisker Automotive brought a pre-production prototype of the Karma to the event. If the pre-production car is at all indicative of the quality that the final product will be, it's going to be a force to be reckoned with when it does ship in 2011 to customers.

Fisker's Silicon Valley showroom is in Sunnyvale, at 898 W. El Camino Real, Sunnyvale, CA 94087. Many thanks to Lisa B. @ Fisker for putting up with my many questions!

Returning to the quality aspect: Holy moly - that thing is beautifully put together. The leather is some of the highest quality I've ever seen in a car - rivaling that of the Ferraris and Aston Martins that I've been exposed to. The leather in my Bimmer can't compare. The wood, as Lisa explained to me, is some sort of wood that spent several hundred years underwater, recovered from a bottom of a lake in Europe - I forget the exact details, but suffice it to say it's rare and exquisite.

Photos below:











Selection of other exceptional cars from the Concours:

The Parrots of Sunnyvale

Photo credit to Katie Slider. Link to Flickr photostream is at the bottom

This post had been in compilation for a while, but, faltered due to the fact that I lacked any photographs of my own to prove my assertions that they do indeed exist. However, I have discovered a few videos to verify the assertions - it's apparently a really well known phenomena around here!

Let me back up. When I first moved to Sunnyvale from Palo Alto (or Shallow Alto as my hellmouth companions are fond of calling it), I was haunted ay the sounds of these - animals. I wasn't sure what they were, but figured they were some sort of exotic bird. Go figure, right? I thought based on the sound they were some hefty predatory animal, but until about two weeks ago, I had never seen the actual source of the noise.

Two weeks ago, I'm going for my cup of morning joe at Starbucks at Mathilda and El Camino at that newish shopping center built on the former orchard. I'm getting out of the car, and I see these odd looking green birds hanging around on the roof of the building. And I do a double take. They're f'in parrots? And then they start squawking. Holy crap, we've got wild parrots? Has hell frozen over? Then I remind myself that I do live in the hellmouth, and that occurrences such as these are not the exception, they are the norm.

I turned on my heel, went for my coffee, and they left me a number of presents all over my car. That's it, I vowed. Time to exact my revenge. Break out the Nikon DSLR and the telephoto lens, and get their mug shots, or so I thought.

My methodology for tracking them based on sound turned out to be remarkably flawed. I must have driven just about every through street in Sunnyvale, windows down, radio off, listening for their haunting squawk. Well, when they don't want to be found, they won't be found. Damn blast, they knew I had it in for them.

Somebody else had a similar idea - and actually took some surprisingly good video of these gorgeous birds.



Link to a local organization that rescues these parrots.
Katie Slider's Flickr page for photos

I spent my morning in 1984 Purgatory

I had to drop somebody at SFO this morning, and I found that they were doing construction at the domestic terminal. This cut off my usual walkway through the drab olive and tan colored 80s themed interior in the parking garage and diverted me to a different access corridor which would be more at home at the old Peppermill Restaurant in front of the Apple campus or strip club than at the San Francisco International Airport.



Of course, the drive home allowed me ample opportunity to get the car's legs stretched on the drive home down 280. 280 in the morning is always a treat.

Sunnyvale Police

Shifting gears here, I have a story to tell. It involves a coworker and comrade in arms in the tech world.

He really pissed off the Sunnyvale Police on Friday. Long story short, I'm getting out of my car in the parking garage at the office, and I am getting my coffee out of the car, getting my laptop slung over my shoulder, etc etc. And I hear this siren coming. And the siren keeps getting louder and louder. And then it gets louder. And I think, jeez, that's really close. The next thing I know, I see my coworker blowing down the ramp with a Sunnyvale PD Crown Vic hot on his tail, lights flashing. My coworker realized the gig was up, and stopped. The Sunnyvale police officer jumped out of her cruiser and demanded he show his hands and turn off the engine. At that point, I figured it was time to take the elevator up to the office and notify his supervisor that he might be a few minutes late.

There had been something of an informal betting pool in the office about when he would get his next ticket, but he surpassed all our expectations when he ended up with his car impounded. The radar detector that I sold him that taken, along with the police apparently refusing to allow him to get anything out of the car. Frankly, I understand their position. I told him, if you don't want the police pissed at you, pull over for them when they turn on their blue and red lights and turn their siren on. I told him, you're lucky you didn't get arrested. You ought to be thankful all they did was impound your Lincoln. But I digress: as it turns out, the reason they impounded his car was because he supposedly had a suspended license (from all the speeding tickets), but he has a letter from the court showing it reinstated two days prior to the impound. Not sure how this will turn out, but I am hoping for the best - for both my coworker and the Police.